Author: Macrobius

Comment from https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/ai-2027-the-polycule-has-a-new-nuclear-threat-for-us.2999/

It’s a surprisingly dated projection. “Brute scaling will lead to AGI” was the party line two years ago because it was a great way to pull in investors but no one really believes it anymore.  Without a winner-take-all effect ensuring that AGI can only be created by quasi-national lab, containment becomes infeasible because the big breakthrough could come from anywhere.

Scott Alexander and friends are still hung up on the AI box experiment and have a hard time conceiving of AGI as anything other than an Eliezer-like intelligence trying to reason its way out of jail.

It’s also a surprisingly “unagentic” view of AI. […]

I quite agree as far as the specific narrative proffered.  The authors know that a good campfire story reels ’em in and that’s fine.  There *is* a danger to Humankind there though, just not the exact way they interpret it.  If you replace ‘artificial intelligences’ with ‘devils’, and ‘alignment’ with Podvig for the Greater Jihad, you will see that the article and even the narrative can be read with in-sight and profit.  But I digress…

The models themselves and their training is ‘not the problem’  It’s not the models that need to be put in a box, but the people who use them.

AI 2027

H/T TBC for the link: https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/ai-2027-the-polycule-has-a-new-nuclear-threat-for-us.2999

There’s the territory ruled by the Western Left, a generally less advanced territory ruled by the Western Right, a third territory ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, and a fourth ruled by Putin. Most people mostly confine their internet activity to one territory and conform their opinions to whatever opinions are promoted there. (That’s not how it feels from the inside, of course. The edges of the Overton Window are hard to notice if you aren’t trying to push past them.)

This is from the 2021 prediction by one of the authors of the paper.

The authors give important justification of their assumptions here. Click individual paragraphs to read each supplement.

In this thread [1]

[1]: https://thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?threads/macrobius-makes-predictions-for-2025-2026.1680/

I promised an ‘environmental analysis’ (as it is called in reference to the business environment) for 2025-2026 and only got most of the way through the P in PEST (Politics, Economics, Society, Technology).  This thread is a home for the T part, even if I don’t do a complete analysis today.

In terms of the gestalt of all four, P, E, S, T it is pretty clear that ‘modernity’ is coming apart at the seems[2] (pun intentional) — in all four areas at once, in a way discussed in the _King in Orange_[3]

[2]: https://thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?threads/the-death-throes-of-modernity.1984/

[3]: https://thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?threads/john-michael-greer-the-king-in-orange-trump.1676/

Technology, which in Neo-Platonic terms is the same as ‘The (Practical) Arts’, compared to Speculation (Science), is certainly playing its part, as are the three ‘economic’ systems of Domestic Economy (home life), Political Economy (communal or society life), and the Divine Economy of the Church and Eschatological Empire (the spiritual life and destiny of Mankind).

The key facts around technology, and I will be primarily speaking to Information Technology here since the manufacturing and service sectors of technology are quite mature and pre-COVID were almost static, have been, recently dominated by Deep Learning AIs — LLMs (Large Language Models) in particular — and ‘crypto’, meaning both the use of mathematical Crytography for ‘security engineering’ and heuristic solution to certain problems of decentralised computing we call ‘the blockchain’, starting with Bitcoin and then Ethereum, but moving far beyond these two large players.